CodeIgniter website moved

Ellislab decided to merge their websites codeigniter.com into ellislab.com, probably to promote their primary product, expression engine some more.

Also as I couldn’t help to check their blog and read that their CEO has stepped down and the CTO has been promoted to that position.

I think Ellislab is doing a great job at maintaining a piece of open source software, in this case CodeIgniter and publicly caring for it over at github. I have never really taken more than a peek at the actual expression engine, but it seems to be working great for a lot of people, but the purposes I have used CodeIgniter for, were always very specific and did not require extensive backend designs. Also I don’t like not to own the software I build projects with, because then they’re hard to open source and it’s also an investment for both my clients and me.

I just noticed the change of the site when I tried to access the documentation for CodeIgniter.

Overall it seems to become more open, visually more appealing but also it has been demoted into a sub section of a company. Also it’s never been licensed under the GPL or similar, but in the license agreement (which is kept incredibly short), it’s stated that basically only the name of the project is protected, so anyone is free to fork and rename it, if Ellislab would make some crazy decisions or close it down, which I consider unlikely, because they get a lot of pull requests and upstream from the community.

I’m watching this little project, that I hold dear and also use in production for cigtrack.info at the moment.

It’s a nice and pretty mature MVC framework and I hope they will continue to keep it awesome and put time and energy in it, because it helps a lot of developers to get to the sugar part of their projects and not to write routers, wrappers, templating engines and other stuff you don’t want to do over and over.